Facebook Ads Lifetime Spend Option Now Available

Sweet a new budget constraint option in Facebook. The lifetime budget setting is a big improvement over setting a daily spend. I have found that weekends really use up a lot of budget, so now Facebook will try to average the daily spend.

 

From the horses mouth:

What is lifetime budgeting?

Lifetime budgeting is very similar to a daily budget but instead of putting an amount to spend per day, you put in a lifetime budget to spend across the finite lifetime of the campaign.

The benefit with lifetime budgeting is the system will also pace your ad spend. For example, if you specify $100 USD to be spent for a 10 day campaign, each day theoretically will need to spend $10/day. If the campaign only spends $8 on the first day, the system will try to make up the missed amount at a later date within the campaign.

 

I am going to test this out right now. Has anyone tried it? 

Happy Birthday Google

Google turned 12 yesterday. Wow has it been that long...

 

Check out how far they have come. Here is their beta homepage:

 

and here is their current homepage:

 

 

Not much has really changed. That is a real testament to their ability to stick to their competitive advantage.

PPC Test

PPC News Roundup for September 24, 2010

http://www.ppchero.com/ppc-news-roundup-for-september-24-2010/

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Want to boost your paid search clicks without increasing your budget? Of course you do! Mike Fleming of Search Engine Guide has advice for accomplishing just that. His tip for increasing clicks is to discover untapped markets that can become successful by developing correlations between what you offer and what searchers may be typing.  The idea is, people don’t always know what they are searching for and you may be able to distract them away from the information they thought they wanted. By running groups of experimental words you may uncover less expensive markets that will work for your business.

In the anticipated merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, many PPC pundits are saying don’t panic; simply transition your Yahoo account to Microsoft adCenter.  According to Brad Geddes at BGTheory.com, if you have a strong Yahoo account, it will be easy to transition your PPC campaign to Microsoft.  And even if you have a nonexistent or weak Yahoo account, you should still look at joining Microsoft adCenter, especially if you have an AdWords account.  It is simple to export your AdWords account to Microsoft, and in fact in his blog, Brad Geddes also links to a Microsoft adCenter blog post that gives you a step-by-step of how to export AdWords to adCenter.

It happens to everyone.  You’ve just written the perfect ad, but there’s a problem – one line is stuck at 36 characters and will not budge.  In these situations, there’s a lot of temptation to cut out the punctuation at the line break. However, as David Szetela at Clix tells us, adwriters need to remember that AdWords ad line lengths can change.  Leaving out a period may look nice in your desktop editor, but as soon as the screen starts to shift online, your beautiful ad is now gobbligook.  You want your ads to always be clear and enticing to your viewers – any ad that has the potential to look unprofessional is a big risk to your PPC campaign.

Bing is encouraging user loyalty with a new Bing Rewards program, where participants can win prizes based on how often they search.  George Michie of The Rimm-Kaufman Group explains the program’s catch to the tune of some great Beatles references.

So you’re down to about a month before the big Yahoo! Microsoft merger…What are you doing to make sure your campaigns don’t tank when they go live in MSN? Once the merger is complete, you’re looking at almost one-third of the search queries in the U.S.; advertiser competition is going to spike for sure. But don’t stress! Tina Kelleher with Microsft adCenter gives some great tips on how to handle this transition in her blog.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land gets a nod this week for his article on Google and Apple extending their search deal. This is somewhat related to PPC right? Last I checked, when selecting a mobile platform in AdWords, iPhone is still the only device mentioned by name.  It’s good the two companies get along. However, the real reason this article makes the cut is because I heard the term “frenemies” for the first time today at lunch (completely unrelated to the Internet) and go figure, it shows up in an article I’m reading this afternoon. Coincidence wins today!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

No Website No Problem

A client of mine was on a really tight budget and wanted to run a Halloween PPC campaign. The problem was that their main site needed a lot of work. There wasn't enough time or money to create a whole new site. So we just created a stand alone page that contained all the basic information to get people into their store and buy Halloween costumes.

Check out their Halloween landing page!

 

 

Facebook Places Now in Canada

Well it is time to get on the Facebook places bandwagon. Facebook is combining Google map and Foursquare with this new functionality. It is free so get on it. This tip comes from 6S marketing:

YES! Facebook Places finally launched in Canada this morning. It’s a few Friday’s later than we originally predicted and the launch is limited to iPhone and iPad users. If you already have the Facebook app installed, you likely are familiar with the inactive Facebook Places button...

For more info click here http://www.facebook.com/places/

Recommended Internet Marketing Books

Recommended Internet Marketing Books: Get busy reading...Blogs are great for staying up to date on internet marketing changes and innovations, but you really need a base. The only way to really get that base is to read at least two books in your desired field. I have read 4 out of 5 of these internet marketing books and the 5th will be read once the holiday season is over.

Amazon.ca Widgets

Landing Page Optimization

You can learn a lot about PPC landing pages from this report from Marketing Experiments

Firefox Add-Ons to Make Your Life Easier

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As a pay per click consultant I spend way too much time online doing research. I have found a few add-ons that are very handy for Firefox, that make my life easier. 

 

Better Gmail 2

This handy little add-on cleans up Gmail. With the addition of so many features to Gmail over the past couple years (eg. Buzz, Chat, Labels and the Invite a friend field) Gmail has started to look really cluttered. Well this add-on will let you remove unwanted features and also add different highlighting capabilities. My favorite options are the curser highlight and attachment icons.

 

Gmail Notifier

Simply adds a Gmail icon to the bottom of the Firefox window that notifies you when an email comes in. The cool thing is that you can link in multiple Gmail accounts. If you’re like me and manage dozens of Adwords accounts it can get difficult managing all those emails. This allows you to link all of them together.

 

Addthis

This is cool because you can link up all your social media accounts to it. If you find a web page you want to add to say your Posterous account, just click, post and your done. If you don't know what Posterous is, get it and figure it out. (Google "The Challenge" and there will be a whole course/module on how to use it)

 

Evernote Clipper

Evernote is an all in one note management system. You can add it to all your device eg. iphone, iPod, home PC, work PC ect...Every time you add a note to it updates all your devices. I personally use this when I find interesting articles that I want to blog about or read later.

 

Keyword Spy

Have you ever wondered what your competitors are bidding on? Well the Keyword Spy will let you spy on PPC and SEO result pages. The free version has limited functionality but the full version is awesome.  Hey and you get PR and Alexa rankings conveniently located in the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox browser.

 

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Facebook Conversion Tracking Program is Finished

Well it is official, the Facebook Ads beta conversion tracking program is dead. You will not be able to track conversion outside of Facebook moving forward. This is extremely bad news because I have had a lot of success with small and large advertisers with Facebook PPC.

Here is the email I received from Facebook:

"Thank you for participating in the Facebook Ads beta conversion tracking program. After reviewing extensive feedback from beta participants, we've decided to discontinue the beta program, effective next month.

What This Means for Your Business
If you use a Facebook conversion tracking tag on your own website, you'll be able to collect tracking data through the beta feature until October 20, 2010, and you'll be able to view historical conversion data through November 1, 2010.

Note: This change only affects conversion tracking pixels used outside of Facebook. We'll continue to automatically track and report on conversions for your Facebook Page or Event."

 

I think they may have stopped the program for two reasons:

1. They want to keep more traffic on Facebook
2. They want to promote building your fan base or event on Facebook
3. Poor performance. I talked to a lot of people who tried Facebook ads and got killed with high costs and poor conversion rates. However this is the same response I get from people when try the Google Display network for the first time.

 

You can still track Facebook ads through other ways but it is a lot more difficult. If you would like help tracking Facebook ads Vancouver Pay Per Click can help integrate the tracking into Google Analytics.

 

 

AdWords Campaign Experiments rolling out globally

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/b2IvD1PGUfU/adwords-campaign-experiments-rolling.html

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Following a successful launch in the U.S., AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) is starting to roll out globally. For those who missed the last blog post, ACE is a free tool that makes it easier to test and precisely measure the impact of changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.

How ACE can help you

ACE reduces the guesswork and potential risk involved with making changes to your campaign. Its scientific split-testing approach gives you valid measurements regardless of changes in demand, competitor movements, or other sales and marketing activity that can complicate traditional before-and-after measurement approaches.

If you can relate to any of the following scenarios, you’ll probably find ACE useful:

• You’re considering adding (or pausing) a bunch of new keywords, but you aren’t sure how it will affect your overall campaign clicks, costs, and conversions.
• You have a few keywords that account for a significant fraction of your total AdWords clicks, conversions and cost. You’d like to know what happens if you raise (or lower) bids by 10%. Do your clicks and conversions change by 10% -- or maybe less than that? How would your cost per click and cost per conversion change?
• You want to easily test a new landing page design tailored for a few high-value keywords against your existing landing page*.
• A colleague suggests you might improve your Google Display Network campaign performance by adjusting keywords and adding some placement-specific bids, but you’re concerned you might wind up with fewer conversions and no improvement in cost per conversion.

In each case, you can set up the experiment to measure the impact with just 10-50% of your traffic -- whatever you specify. ACE runs the experiment side-by-side with the existing setup. In AdWords, easy-to-read visual indicators show you wherever performance is significantly different between the two.

Where to find ACE and learn more

After signing into AdWords, you can access ACE on the Campaign tab under Settings. For those outside the U.S., this is a rolling launch so you should see it within a week or so.

To learn more about using ACE, check out these videos and the Help Center FAQ.

* ACE makes it simple to test two different landing pages for a keyword, an ad, or an ad group directly in AdWords. If you want to test more than two landing page designs at a time, test a landing page with multiple traffic sources (for example, all search traffic, display and email campaigns, etc.) or simultaneously test multiple elements on the landing page, we instead recommend Google Website Optimizer.

September 14 Update: ACE is fully supported in the newest AdWords API version announced today.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

The MEGA List of Free and Paid SEO Tools the Professionals Use

http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sew/~3/g33xFbRH4bQ/3641330

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Rankings, link analysis, trends, keyword research, metrics, and beyond -- we've compiled a list of must-have free/paid tools, toolbars, and browser plug-ins for all SEO professionals. ...

Creating a schedule for managing your ppc accounts

I really don't think people realize how much time it takes to manage a large pay per click account. This article illustrates how much time it takes to manage a large account and why you should outsource your pay per click management if you don't have the time.

http://searchengineland.com/your-daily-weekly-monthly-paid-search-routine-497...

AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Here at Vancouver PPC we realize that not everyone understands pap per click like we do. So here are some great resources on the basics of quality score in Adwords. Happy reading. 

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/WoDsPLb1c-k/adwords-myths-understanding-adwords.html

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

(click to watch on YouTube)

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew